The Scientific Revolution in the Western Civilization

Despite of the Eastern Europe where the scientific thought did not exist as a notion and the notion of science was replaced by a notion of phylosophy, in the Western Europe the power of religion existed controlling all the spheres of state. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there were the first attempts to look at the world in a different way. The word ‘philosophy’ was used of ‘science’.

At that time many people changed their way of thinking looking away from the religion. They used their logic in an attempt to find answers the the most basic questions about life and death, world and universe. In general, science is an attempt to explain the world without the connection to gods. Science looks at the world as an object trying to explain how the Earth moves, etc. Religion, on the contrary, saw the world as a godlike beginning denying all scientific developments. At that time religion united people and was one of the major tools of power. Theocracy, a power of religion, meant that the church controlled everything in the state and all the scientific thoughts were not accepted, were denied. People were punished for their scientific works and innovations. Much time has passed when science became popular and scientific thoughts were published and people cound read these books.

The scientific revolution started in 1543 when Nicolas Copernicus published his ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium’ (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres). The publication of this book was followed by Andreas Vesalius’s ‘De humani corporis fabrica’(On the Fabric of the Human body). The scientific revolution influenced the development of philosophical and religious thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had a great influence on the life of educated people of the Western World. The discoveries and scientific works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, Albert Einstein, Grace Hopper and Newton became a real innovation at that time.

The scientific revolution was a solely Western phenomenon. It took lasted about 150 years and entirely changed the previous ways of thinking. This revolution is associated with natural science and a change in technology. However, scientific revolution was not just one change, but a number of changes in the way of thinking of people in the Western Europe. These changes influenced every aspect of people’s live: sculpture, painting, architecture.

In the Middle Ages there were taken the first attempts for understanding the physical world in the medieval universities. The philosophy began from the works of a well-known ancient philosopher Aristotle that had a great influence on people dominating in the Western Civilization (p.541). Besides, scientific revolution caused changes in two main disciplines – astronomy and biology. At that time biology meant the fundamental rules of anatomy and astronomy studies the solar system. The contemporary world and all its innovations appeared owing to the scientific revolution and as a result, the discoveries. Science became a fundamental source of knowledge, the major feature of the contemporary world.